"Nobody reads his blog anymore." Truer words were never spoken. Anyhow, here's the latest books that I've been reading:
AROOGA!!! AROOGA!!! IT'S AROUND A MONTH SINCE I POSTED THIS. I'VE BEEN DOING A LOT OF READING E-BOOKS ON PUBLIC TRANSIT & A FEW REGULAR BOOKS AS WELL WHEN I'M HOME. THIS IS WHERE I'LL POST A RECORD OF 'EM FOR MY NARCISSISTIC EDIFICATION! (INSTEAD OF HAVING TO MAKE A NEW POST THAT OTHER PEOPLE REALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT.) Now back to the original post ...
First off, I read a couple of books about "Exoplanets." These are planets outside of our solar system. The first one was by Ray Jayawardhana called Strange New Worlds. I had an edition from 2013 (or 2015) and a lot has happened since then. Jayawardhana does a good job of explaining the theories and the methods whereby astronomers somehow fucking observe the patterns of light from tiny planets a gajillion kilometres (or lots of light-years) away as they pass in front of, or around, or somewhere in the vicinity of stars 50, 100, 200 or more times their size. Sadly, for a lazy moron such as myself, there wasn't much in the way of science-fantasy descriptions of the weird and wonderful worlds found at the time of his writing. Probably because that would be speculation. Then I read Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets, and the New Search for Life Beyond Our Solar System by Michael Summers and James S. Trefil. This book is from 2017 which meant it was written after more telescopes and satellites had come on line and even more exoplanets had been discovered. My take away from reading both of these books is that it's more likely than ever that we're alone in the galaxy. Both books talk a great deal about how we'd be able to find methane or oxygen from the light shifts emanating from exoplanets, signifying water or even life (as I dimly remember, both of those elements dissipate quickly and need to be replenished by things like plants or other lifeforms to be able to register in a planet's atmosphere) and so far they haven't found squat. It was kinda wild to read about rogue planets. These would be planets ejected from the solar systems where they were forming and which now float in the starless darkness of the endless void. At one point, one of the books mention how heat from radioactive elements in the planets or from tidal heating inside a moon circulating a rogue planet could theoretically provide the elements necessary for life even on these godforsaken places. I don't remember how they claim they know this, but both books state that there are way more rogue planets drifting about the Milky Way than there are planets orbiting stars. Finally, about orbiting stars: Earth is way out in the suburbs of the galaxy, halfway down one of the spiral arms. Closer in to the galactic centre wouldn't be a good place for life because the greater likelihood of cataclysms caused by nearby exploding stars.
On a different note, I recently finished Seven Days in Hell: Canada's Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers by David O'Keefe. Not counting the massacre of the Newfoundland Regiment on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (when Newfoundland wasn't yet a part of Canada) and the debacle at Dieppe, the losses of Montreal's Black Watch Regiment during Operation Spring in 1944 were the highest suffered by any Canadian regiment. O'Keefe does a good job of describing the history of the regiment and the social caste of its leadership. (Local regiments were once a big part of the social life of the Anglo-Canadian leadership class.) For my part, I'm not a details person and the series of mini-bios of various members of the regiment were received by my eyes, made nary an imprint on my brain and dissipated into the ether soon afterwards. Sadly, this series of names belong mostly to men whose only part in the subsequent drama is to take a bullet (or some other piece of metal) at some point and die. Because that's the slaughter-house of war. The story itself is depressing. As part of an elaborate plan designed by Canadian Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, most of the Black Watch regiment ends up trapped on a hill called Verrières Ridge for two entire days while the rest of the regiment and other Canadian units struggle to maintain control of two villages immediately behind them. O'Keefe tells the story well enough and clearly enough. His commentary at the end of the excuses of the military leadership, especially the refusal of Simonds to accept the blame that was clearly his is done well. He also makes it clear during the events of the battle how Simonds' immediate subordinates felt compelled to mindlessly demand adherence to his orders even when it was clear that the conditions on the ground had changed and made them meaningless.
It's sort of a message about Canada's place in the world that we have barely remembered something like the sufferings of the Black Watch regiment on Verriѐres ridge while the families of the THIRTY THOUSAND who died due partly to the incompetence and callousness of Field Marshall Zuhkov at the Battle of the Zeelow Heights.
Next up I read a wonderful book; The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson. If you want to, you can find a review of this book from NPR that says it's a disappointment compared to Bryson's previous works. If that's the case I'll have to find those too! Because this one is excellent. Every page contains a fascinating fact about a particular part of the body and it just keeps going on and on. I returned it to the library unfinished because I want to buy a copy of my own and finish it.
Finally, I read The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker. This is US-American, female (mentioned because it's important to the book) journalist's account of her years as a foreign correspondent in South Asia for the Chicago Tribune. It was later adapted for film as "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot" starring Tina Fey, but from what I've read of the plot of that film it is only very loosely based on the book.
Reading this book I occasionally felt the irritation I get when journalists make themselves the story. But then I'd remember that in this case the journalist's story IS the story. Barker says that the reason she got selected to go to South Asia was because she was single, and somehow "expendable." She has an apartment in Delhi, India, but spent most of her time in Afghanistan and later Pakistan. She's actually a good journalist so far as the mainstream media goes. She's able to accurately and concisely summarize decades of these nations' histories in a few short paragraphs and she describes the individuals in question from Karzai to various others, especially Afghanistan Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet and former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The latter two men were apparently interested in having Barker as a mistress. I believe her accounts of those episodes.
Barker describes the social lives of foreign correspondents in Kabul and Islamabad as often drunken, hedonistic communities of self-absorbed, entitled foreigners. She appeared to understand the impact their behaviour had on the Afghans and Pakistanis who witnessed it. She does a good job of describing how the corruption of Karzai's warlord-backed government would eventually bring about its downfall. I would recommend this book for the numerous important insights it provides, including her account of the slow death of newspapers in the United States. One major criticism that I have with the book is how she makes the United States government appear almost as an innocent bystander in all of this. She doesn't really say this, but there is so little on the USA's influence/domination of events (especially in Afghanistan) that the overall impression one gets is simply not accurate.
From the review:
She is not optimistic about the countries she left behind. “At some point,” she writes, “I realized the horrible truth — the United States and its allies could win every single battle in Afghanistan and blow up every single alleged top militant in Pakistan, but still lose this war.”
“I was sure of two things,” she goes on, “that a deal among governments and militants would never hold in that harsh environment, and that our current plan with its expiration date was doomed to failure. The United States would be better off bringing everyone home than sticking to a compromise, to the impassible middle road. The only workable solution to the region’s many problems was a long-term commitment from the world, with no end date in sight, focused on building actual governance systems rather than propping up various personalities. Only a long-term plan would prevent the region from falling into further chaos.”
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What the hell (2021-09-15) I'll add two more boox I've started since I made that post:
First off: Barry Luokkala's Exploring Science Through Science Fiction ...
This book turned out to be a textbook for a course on, well, exploring science through science fiction. As such, sometimes, instead of answers to questions about whether some science fiction concept is realistic or not, there are exercises requiring high school algebra that I'm too stupid to know how to do. Nonetheless, this is a pretty sweet book. The section on hadrons, fermians, gluons and leptons has stuck with me better than other accounts from previous reads.
I also just finished reading Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale. I was looking for information about (specifically) the sacking of Rome in 1527. I've been reading and watching some art documentaries and the topic had come up. When I saw this book though I decided to give it a whirl. It really is a good way to look at the history of the city. Kneale is a very readable writer who makes history come alive. The discussions of the actual military events, the personalities involved, the state of the city at the time and afterwards, ... all the information is provided in crisp, comprehensive fashion.
A book about the experiences of a neurologist: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper & B. D. Burrell.
Also David Sedaris's The Best of Me - a compiliation of his humourous anecdotes/short stories/vignettes from 25 years of his writing career.
Let's not EVER forget a book (that I bought at a discount because I'm poor) Erica Benner's Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World. Benner here argues that the father of "Machiavellianism," Niccolo Machiavelli, was actually a straight-up guy. Much of his cynical advice to the re-established Medici family tyranny was meant to be ironic. The review in the link says she's stretching things. Personally I think the truth falls between Benner and the reviewer. Machiavelli was an idealist who, at the same time, recognized the frailties and failings of human beings. But he believed (as I do) that a just society, and an efficient society, require a great degree of social equality and idealism.
There's also Touching the Jaguar: Transforming Fear Into Action To Change Your Life & the World by John Perkins (formerly an "Economic Hit-Man.")
Can't forget Professor Maxwell's Duplicitous Demon: The Life and Science of James Clerk Maxwell by Brian Clegg.
Okay. Now it's October 25th, 2021, and my current reads are as follows:
Patti Smith's The Year of the Monkey.
Somebody told me that her memoir Just Kids was excellent, but there was a waiting list for it at the library so I decided to check out this one instead. It's 2016. Ms. Smith is going to turn seventy at the end of December. Some longtime friend of hers (a guy named Sandy) is comatose in the hospital. She meets people and talks about writers with them. Her friend, actor/playwright Sam Shepard is struggling with ALS and Smith helps him finish one of his last works. Donald Trump gets elected. Smith wanders around the USA sitting in small restaurants and occasionally returning to her own place in NYC.
I've also got a huge book: The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wooton.
It's hard to tell how big an e-book is when you sign it out onto your cellphone. But I keep reading and reading and I'm still only 25% into it. It's a sprawling work with lots of quotes and citations. I'm finding it very enjoyable. Wooton takes on revisionist historians who claim that there was no scientific revolution and he also challenges Thomas Kuhn's thesis of revolutions via controversies, to argue about a sometimes slow, sometimes all at once, demolition of the deductive reasoning/assertions of the Ancients (Galen, Ptolemy, Aristotle) via the discoveries of Columbus, Gallileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton and others. [Obviously, the continents that became North and South America existed before Columbus stumbled upon them. But one could say the same thing about a restaurant one has "discovered." You didn't know of it before. It's now a part of your world. The thing about discovering a new land mass to the east of China was that it entirely up-ended the Ptolemaic model of the world as a solid sphere of earth suspended in a sphere of water (that was itself surrounded by a larger sphere of air). The appearance of a "new star" (actually a super-nova) in 1572 challenged the idea of a perfect, unchanging heaven. Stuff like that. People gradually became more interested in facts than in theories derived from the deductive reasonings of ancient authorities. Experiment and repeatablity and seeing for yourself became the stuff of "Science." Highly recommended.
I've just finished The Yellow House by Martin Gayford.
It's about the time (October - December, 1888) Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh lived together in Arles, France. I'd also had a hazy idea of this story (which ended with Gauguin leaving Van Gogh and the latter cutting off some, or all, of his left ear and giving it to a prostitute) and wanted to know more about it. Gayford does a good job of describing the personal and creative tensions that built up between the two artists, using their letters to Theo Van Gogh (who was subsidizing their artists' colony) and other friends and I find his interpretations of the works they did during their time together to be convincing. Gayford also says that poor Vincent suffered from bipolar disorder and I agree with him here as well. Van Gogh's behaviour through his entire life was driven by manic impulses and ideals.
I also recently finished Joshua Rubenstein's The Last Days of Stalin.
It deals with the events leading up to Stalin's death in March 1953; the significance of his death; and the Russian and international response to it. It's very clear and readable. Rubenstein has a good understanding of the nature of Stalin's dictatorship. Like most mainstream Western historians of the Cold War he places too much faith in the idea of a United States as a genuine beacon for democracy and human rights.
While reading The Invention of Science I got intruiged with the character of Lucretius, a poet from Ancient Rome, whose one surviving work, the poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) expanded upon the ideas of Democritus and Epicurus that everything is made up of indivisible atoms. In his poem Lucretius praises Venus for making all life on Earth desirous of life. Living things and non-living things, everything in the universe is made up from the random connections of swerving atoms. There is no rhyme or reason or purpose to anything. Humanity is not the central point of the universe. There is no God or gods watching over us. Our lives are only of importance to ourselves. We come from nothing, exist as creatures who feel pain and pleasure and then we return to nothing. Our species evolved and survives because our traits enabled us to do so. One day we will either find that the environment defeats us or we will change into something else that is capable of surviving in a different environment.
I thought he sounded like a super cool guy so I tried to find an ebook about Lucretius. What was available was Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. This book is about the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini and how he found a copy of De rerum natura in a German monastery in January 1417 after it had been lost for 900 years. It then discusses the influence of the recovered poem claiming that it was vital in transforming European society from weakening Medieval culture and ushering in the Renaissance.
The review I linked to above is harshly critical of Greenblatt. (Apparently others are too.) Saying he simplifies the Medieval period and even distorts it. I'm no scholar on the subject but I think it's unquestionable that the transformation from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was undoubtedly a much more gradual process than what people thought had been the case up until the mid-20th Century. At the same time, I think the reviewer makes some excessive claims about the level of intellectual freedom and secularism of the Middle Ages. There's actually a good debate going on in the comments section there. Anyway, I enjoyed the book as it was my first real look at the literary humanists of the early Renaissance. Having gone to art school I knew much more about the painters and sculptors who were actually more followers than leaders in the early Renaissance.
I guess I forgot to mention that I read J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter a few weeks back.
I'm proud to say that I stumbled into Tolkien independently when I was a youth. I think that I was eleven or twelve. My friend down the street was being driven to the library by his mom. I'd gone to his place just to see if he wanted to hang out. His mom asked me if I wanted to come along and I said sure. So when we got there I went looking in the (I think) "Young Fiction" section and I saw a title on a book spine: The Hobbit. "What the hell is a 'hobbit'?" I thought to myself. I took the book off the shelf and on the cover was a simple drawing of the back of a little person with a tall pointed cap looking off towards a long road stretching off to a distant mountain range. "A journey! I love stories about long journeys and quests!" So I signed it out. And, obviously, I loved it. I went on to read The Lord of the Rings three times, the last time being in my first year of college. I've since lost much interest in Tolkien's story. I don't share his politics or his religiosity. I think it's moralism is simplistic. But as an adventure story it is quite good. Excellent.
I have my doubts about Peter Jackson as well. But I think his adaptation of the Rings trilogy was brilliant. (I would have liked if he had used dwarfs to play the hobbit parts.) I couldn't be bothered to see his adaptation of The Hobbit. I hear it was a bloated mess.
Anyways, Carpenter's biography: I was still interested in knowing more about the man behind the book that had been so formative to me growing up. Carpenter's biography is a nicely written, nuanced look at Tolkien's life and personality. You get the understanding that Tolkien was a genuine scholar and also a dedicated teacher. His relationship with his wife appeared to be (in my eyes) somewhat strained for most of its duration. Tolkien's era seemed to be one where men preferred each other's company while women stayed home with the kids. And then they wondered why their wives were so boring.
Tolkien comes across as a hard-working, if absent-minded professor. You see how writing his fiction works really interfered with his scholarly duties. In the end though he lived to see himself become a world-renowned, beloved author. He died almost as he lived. A respectable Oxford scholar and family man. The only difference was that he had become quite wealthy in his old age and could afford to live wherever he wanted to.
It was comforting for me to read about such a comfortable existence.
December 6th, 2021
Finished reading John Julius Norwich's Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.
Norwich was Duff Cooper's son. I remember Cooper's name from histories of World War II. I believe he was something like Neville Chamberlain's propaganda minister or something. Anyhow, ... the Catholic Church is over 2,000 years old. It's had a lotta popes. I don't know very much its early history. I wasn't expecting to be able to remember much about what I was going to read, but that I'd retain some impressions. Norwich tells the story of every pope, including those who lived only a few months (who obviously don't get much said about them). He writes the whole book as one long, meandering tale, without much recourse to big themes. It's the sort of history that professional historians deride as "one damn thing after another." Still and all, if the history of the papacy is your thing, it would be nice to have this on your bookshelf so that you could open to the part you're interested in and get a nice, homey introduction to the men in question. As is quoted in the Wikipedia link above:
New York Times reviewer Bill Keller states of Norwich, "He keeps things moving at nearly beach-read pace by being selective about where he lingers and by adopting the tone of an enthusiastic tour guide, expert but less than reverent." The reviewer noted that Norwich has little to say about the theology of the Popes, and treats their doctrinal disputes as a diplomatic matter. [1]
Los Angeles Times reviewer Janet Kinosian writes of Norwich, "with his unstuffy and sometimes witty writing style, he walks us through what could otherwise be a stifling couple of thousand years of popes, antipopes, endless political power struggles, war, greed, torture, inquisitions, egomania, incest, fornication, bastard children and orgies."[2]
Finished reading Norman Stone's The Eastern Front: 1914-1917.
According to Stone, Russia wasn't so much defeated by material incapacity to fight a modern war (insufficient food supply, weapons, transport, etc.,) so much as by military incompetence and undeveloped political-economic managerial skills. IOW Russia produced more than enough food, had plenty of artillery shells and sufficient railway capacity to have moved most of these weapons and resources to where they needed to be. But the traditional ways of collecting and distributing the harvest didn't synch with the dislocations of the railways. The inflation that Russia experienced was worse than that suffered by its allies because the Russian state had less knowledge and control over the country's economy. The railways were run by military and private-sector incompetents. It was often missused to transport large numbers of cavalry horses and their fodder to various fronts where they would sit uselessly.
The military leadership was divided by rivalries between aristocratic cavalry officers, artillerists and infantrymen, with the latter two comprised of competing nobility and peasant-class officers who did not work well together. There was no general staff to provide a unified command and the generals at the front stuck to a plan of attack that they saw did not work. (This being a massive artillery bombardment at a narrow front with a massive, concentrated infantry push to follow, supposedly producing a breakthrough that would then decimate the enemy from behind. But the massive artillery barrage only alerted the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies to where the attack would be, allowing them to move reserves to the battle. The infantry would be bogged down marching through a bomb-blasted, cratered muddy morass, where they were destroyed by the enemy's own artillery and machine guns.) Seeing that this didn't work, most Russian generals said the failures were caused by an insufficient preliminary bombardment and, possibly, by the laziness and cowardice of the infantry. As a result, Russian generals tended to stay on the defensive against Germany. (They were more aggressive against the even more incompetent Austrians.)
Only General Brusilov was able to break with this strategy and launch attacks without preliminary shellings, on a broad front, so that the Germans were taken by surprise and didn't know where to move their reserves too. Even so, Brusilov's offensives were costly in terms of the lives lost.
The war shook the political-economies of all its participants (aside from the late-comers in the USA) but Russia was too undeveloped in these areas for the preservation of the status-quo. Stone doesn't write much about the 1917 Revolution because his book is about the military-economic-political shortcomings that produced it.
2021-12-19
So I recently finished M. A. Soupios's The Greeks Who Made Us Who We Are. Eighteen Ancient Philosophers, Scientists, Poets and Others.
Because I wanted to know more about just what the book said it's about; just why Ancient Greece is held to be crucial to the formation of Western Civilization and how they made us different from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, India, Central Asia, China, East Asia.
I have to say, the book doesn't really do that. It doesn't specifically describe Western Civilization and it doesn't describe "the Other" (all the other civilizations). Methinks the author didn't want to come out in this day-and-age and say that we're more rational and that individuals inherently count for more here than in places where other individuals do. (Despite our many centuries of sacrificing individuals to feudalism and sweat-shops and religious delusions.)
The book was all my back-up hopes were for it to be. A good introduction to some important Greek names that I otherwise wouldn't have been introduced to. Offhand, I can't remember who they were. But that's not important for me. I'm sure if I encounter them again, a foundation will have been laid.
I'll add to say that it's good to have a thesaurus handy when reading this book. I've taken that test on fazebuck and my vocabularly consistently comes out 10-points higher than anyone else I know. And I remember several times reading this fucking book and having to look a word up. (Or not caring because I already looked up a few and they were new but not necessary.)
And this very day, I finished Barry Broadfoot's Six War Years. (Jesus Christ! I just noticed that the writer of that "Maclean's" article about the book is Barry Broadfoot himself! And I just learned from having just read his Wikipedia page that Broadfoot's story (in a book of oral histories) about a 17-year old newspaper photographer who had to get mini-bios of killed servicemen from their families, was his own story. Broadfoot mentions being a veteran of the war. He joined up the next year in 1944 for two years in the infantry.
Anyhew, ... I'd read Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years about Canadians in the Great Depression. And I've read Studs Terkel's The Good War, an excellent, superb, you really must read it, oral history of ordinary US-Americans in World War II. So when I saw this book in a second-had clothing store in Kensington Market I snapped it up.
More later ...
I'm back. So, anyway, this is a grand book with numerous voices talking about their experiences as ordinary Canadians of the Second World War. There's accounts of being fired on by German artillery during a daylight bombing run. Apparently the building of the Alaska Highway was a huge moment in the Canadian North. Some woman in Toronto slept with lots and lots of soldiers and finished the war with $7,000 (plus $5,0000 in war bonds) in her pocket. That's $190,000 in today's money. Another guy remembers elderly women in Halifax seeing the soldiers off as they embark for Europe. One of them says: "Don't forget to write your mother!" He says that because of her he did write to his mother more than he otherwise would have. Then, after the war, he's back in Halifax coming off the troop ship and he sees the same woman and she asks "Did you remember to write your mother?" He's stunned. Did she remember and recognize him? But, no. He hears her ask the same question to another soldier a little farther behind him. Her and all her friends have simply been there dockside during the whole war doing what they could. He thought maybe they should have gotten a medal.
December 25th, 2021: Yesterday I finished Owen Matthews' An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent.
Back when I was working on a screenplay about World War II I would occasionally come across the name Richard Sorge. He was one of the many people warning Stalin about Hitler's plans to attack the USSR whom Stalin disregarded. [Stalin's view on this issue wasn't as blinkered as it's usually made out to be. He was constantly receiving warnings about an attack on such-and-such a date that proved false.] Sorge also told Stalin that the Japanese would not be attacking the USSR, but instead would be moving south to capture the European colonies in East Asia, especially the oil-rich Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This time his information was believed and Stalin used it to move much of his Siberian forces westward for the crucial Battle of Moscow. When telling this story, authors would usually refer to Sorge as a master spy and how one of his Japanese prosecutors saying of him: "In my whole life, I have never met anyone as great as he was."
I actually found out about this book from that Jacobin review. The parts of the review I want to emphasize are here:
It is true, of course, that Sorge ended his life working for a state and movement that had Stalin as its unquestioned leader. But his fundamental loyalty was to communism and world revolution rather than Stalin himself. He joined the Communist movement in his native Germany when the Soviet Union had a collective leadership in which Vladimir Lenin was first among equals. As Matthews goes on to show, there is some reason to think he remained loyal to that movement in spite of Stalin’s rise to power rather than because of it.
...
Judging by the evidence that Matthews presents, Sorge appears to have been as ethical a figure as you could reasonably expect from someone in his profession. The true contradiction of his life was an external one. In order to serve a good cause, Sorge had to continue working for some bad people, who only made proper use of his intelligence when circumstances gave them little choice.
His career symbolized both sides of the Soviet experiment: the idealism and self-sacrifice that it inspired, and the bureaucratic cynicism that eventually dragged down those hopes. As far as Sorge himself was concerned, there’s no need to overcomplicate things. Sometimes a hero is just a hero.
You can read the whole review for a summary of this book about Sorge's life of adventure. For my part, two things made the book a worthwhile read on their own: I did not know that the German navy captured a British freighter to Singapore. On the freighter was a diplomatic pouch which contained a statement that the British high command didn't think it was possible to defend their colony of Singapore from a Japanese attack, since they were stretched to the limit fighting the Germans on the other side of the world. The German embassy in Tokyo tried to use this information to convince the Japanese to go in against Britain. It didn't work at the time, but it must have factored into later Japanese plans.
The other revelation was the importance of the USA imposing an oil embargo on Japan for its occupation of French Indo-China. At the time, Japan's obstreporous Kwantung Army was winning in the debate over whether to attack Britain and the USA or the Soviet Union, with the Kwantung Army wanting their target to be the Soviets. Japan's political leadership and the Japanese navy were doubtful of their ability to successfully attack the Red Army without massive resources. The oil embargo made such an attack even more doubtful and made attacking the Dutch East Indies more of a priority.
It's a well written book about a remarkable man at a critical moment in world history.
2021-12-30
I've been reading The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality by Dave Goldberg. I just noticed that the writer of the review I linked to is Sabine Hossenfelder! I've been watching her videos at her YouTube channel: "Science Without the Gobbledygook." I agree with Hossenfelder that Goldberg occasionally brings up term without explaining where they came from. Other times he's explained things that I've been wondering about since I started reading physics books for dummies like me. The main problem is me. I'm just not retaining anything. I think my brain is very tired and overwhelmed these days. I've read half the book and I'm going to have to return it. I'm not panning the book. The review is positive and fair.
Next up is Modern Afghanistan: The Impact of 40 Years of War edited by M. Nazif Shahrani. It's a series of academic studies that mostly look at the consequences of constant violence and lawlessness on smaller communities. Some of the chapters are surprisingly dry as dust considering what they're talking about. Other chapters convey a sense of the mechanics of social functioning in such chaotic circumstances. It was produced in 2018 and many of the studies are from a couple of years before that. So it's a look at the Afghanistan under US-NATO occupation and, obviously things have changed since then. So it's all kinda depressing and, well, academic. I got the sense that the writer are all more sympathetic to the West and in my view this makes them seem a little out-of-touch with those of their countrymen who, when faced with a choice of two militarized sides, seem to have sympathized more with the Taliban. (Oh yeah, there's a good chapter near the beginning about the calculated uses of Islam by various power-brokers, including the Saudis and Pakistanis who funded the schools of the Taliban.) Occasionally there's a mention of the extreme corruption of the US-NATO Afghanistan, the disaffection of unemployed young, male Afghans in the face of this corruption. I recall reading numerous sources pointing out the corruption and brutality of the Afghan military and police. I guess all of these "commanders" and "warlords" and the politicians like Karzai and their families were undone by their own extremely selfish, short-sighted behaviour.
2022-01-09
Yesterday I finished cartoonist Ben Katchor's 2011 work The Cardboard Valise.
I've enjoyed Katchor's off-beat sense of humour and unique visual style for years now. His work captures a dying moment of the urban experience from before everything was corporatized. A time when small businesses with eccentric owners could sustain themselves from eccentric clienteles. So you never knew what would be around the next corner. Now what's around the next corner is either a boarded-up storefront or a Starbucks.
You'd have to read this book to understand the stories of Emile Delilah and Elijah Salamis. And the ways that they and so many other characters get so worked-up about such strange things as they do. My favourite story was about the "Pile Animus," built in 1962 by King Boreal Rince of Outer Canthus for his hated second-cousin.
2022-01-11 Last night I finished The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan.
Cahalan talks about how mentally ill people always seem to end up in terrible conditions, from London's Bethlehem ("Bedlam") in the 18th Century up to the present day. Occasional attempts to reform the barbaric conditions uncovered by journalists and activists would end up relapsing into barbarism. She writes about some psychologist named David Rosenham who had a study published in Science which said he had a bunch of grad students get themselves committed as pseudo-patients in various mental health institutions and describe how they were treated. According to Rosenham, ordinary people don't have to try too hard to get diagnosed as schizophrenic. As well, it's hard for even sane people to get themselves out of these places as the psychiatrists and the institutions' staffs subsequently look at everyone under their care as "crazy" and incapable and the dehumanizing nature of institutionalization is itself detrimental to an individual's sanity.
Rosenham's study turned out to be dodgy itself though. And given that it's enormous impact became part of the impetus towards the trend to "de-institutionalization" in the 1970's (behind the influence of neo-liberal budget cuts) it's led to the prison system in the USA taking up the job at the cost of greater suffering.
The book is about the difficult questions of how to deal with a very complicated issue with lots of grey areas. Spending more money though is a necessity.
It made me think about the current distrust of science with regards to public health measures and vaccines in the pandemic. And my thinking has that it is always permissable to question authority and experts. But one should be humble about one's own capabilities to do so. This holds true for social scientists (like economists) and semi-scientists (like healers of the mind) to "hard" scientists (like neurologists). Personally, I think that some people are definitely mentally ill in that urges and beliefs beyond their control lead them to behaviour that seriously endangers their overall health. Furthermore, some of these people use pharmaceuticals that both they and impartial observers (and partial observers such as the ill person's loved ones) would agree have helped them to live a normal life. At the same time, the mental health profession has diagnosed unusual, non-conformist behaviour as mental illness and have forced chemicals on people that turns them into zombies. How does this happen?
Governments and corporations (including Big Pharma) might want to control us and fleece us but when you find yourself needing a ventilator and suffering from necrotizing pneumonia and you know of several other "freedom fighters" who ended up in the same position and you finally agree that COVID is real and the local hospital is saying (along with every other hospital on the face of the planet) that the bulk of people in the ICU are the unvaccinated (even though they're a minority of the general population) it's time to pull your head out of your fucking ass.
2022-01-19
I've only read 33% of John Toland's The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. But it's due tomorrow and somebody is waiting for it apparently.
Toland is a good writer. I've just finished the part about the Bataan Death March. Occasionally he lapses into the Western writer's habit of attributing deep cultural differences between the Japanese and Occidentals, to whit: Our legal-rational minds just can't fathom the natural Asian tendency to duplicity and relativism. But often enough he appears to snap back and realize that we're all of us full of shit.
2022-01-31
I just finished Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Very much out of my comfort zone. Lot's of fascinating facts. Here's a review:
Say “fungus” and most people will think of mushrooms. However, they are only the above-ground fruiting bodies that serve to disperse fungal spores. Most of what a fungus does happens underground. Here, they form mycelium: networks of fine, tubular cells called hyphae. Leave it to Sheldrake to dissolve boundaries and make you rethink everything you thought you knew about living organisms. Mycelium is “better not thought of as a thing, but as a process – an exploratory, irregular tendency” (p. 7), as “a body without a body plan” (p. 55), writes Sheldrake. Mycelial fungi are maze dwellers, probing the underground world in search of resources. Hyphae can branch and fuse, exploring in all directions simultaneously. These amorphous, shape-shifting entities have no fixed shape. Like water, “mycelium decants itself into its surroundings” (p. 58).
And while there is no “brain”, no centre of control, mycelium somehow communicates information through its network. When it finds something to digest, hyphae leading there grow more numerous, while those leading nowhere are pruned. Mycelium communicates this information across its network with surprising rapidity, though how is still open for debate. Pressure changes as in a hydraulic network? Volatile chemicals? A likely candidate that Sheldrake highlights are electrical impulses.
My neighbour loaned it to me after we talked about a fungus documentary we'd both seen on Netflix.
2022-02-02
Just finished The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan by Ian Buruma. As I reported above, I'd read some of John Toland's book about the Japanese experience of World War Two. I know a fair bit about the Anglo-American experience of that war (that term includes Canada). I've read a fair bit about the Soviet/Russian experience and somewhat less of the German experience. But I realized that I hadn't really looked at the Japanese. I remain more interested in hearing about industrial production and the civilian experience. So when I was looking for e-books on the subject I found Toland's book and then I saw Buruma's book. Which looked interesting.
First of all, I have to say that my knowledge of US-American barbarism in Vietnam and in the Great Bullshit War on Terror of the past twenty years, and Britain's disgusting behaviour in Kenya (to name only one place) in the postwar period, as well as Canada's penchant for murdering Aboriginal children and dumping their bodies in mass graves and committing war-crimes in Afghanistan, makes me pretty immune to the temptation to ascribe some particular cultural or genetic shortcomings to Germans and Japanese. For the most part Buruma avoids this too. But he still sees something particularly German or Japanese in the way that these countries behaved during the war. (Oh yeah. Canadian soldiers were notorious for killing their prisoners in World War I.) I wonder what Buruma (who is from the Netherlands) AND OMFG!!! Buruma was the editor of the New York Review of Books who stupidly ran a narcissistic, self-pitying essay by violent predator Jian Ghomeshi, and was fired for it!!!! ... Anyway, I was going to wonder what Buruma knows (if he has even bothered to research it) about Dutch atrocities in their former colony of Indonesia.
This is not to say that the Nazi's industrialization of racist mass murder and the Japanese military's deliberate brutalities in China and the Philippines were not historically noteworthy instances of cultural degeneracy and insanity. They were. And the different ways that both these countries face up to these shameful pasts is illuminating in so many ways.
At the time that I was reading the book I felt that Buruma comes across as a typical liberal. By that I mean the part of the book where he talks about how contemporary Germany and Japan responded to the USA-led attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq displays all the liberal, pro-US interpretation of that conflict. That Saddam was an aggressor [he was] being restrained by the "rules-based international order" led by the heroic United States of America. But, anyway, ... it's an interesting book and Buruma interviews many interesting people with novel things to say about these important topics.
2022-02-07
I finished Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment and why it still matters a couple of days ago.
Pagden writes about the waning influence of Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) in Europe during the 17th and 18th Centuries, at least upon the educated minority. There was a growing attempt to construct a system of ethics and morals out of evidence-backed reason rather than tradition and divine authority. There was a growing (if inconsistent) appreciation of the common humanity of all the people's of the world. There's two big sections on how the Enlightenment writers felt about the cultures of Tahiti and China. I agree with the reviewer I linked to who says Pagden's breadth of research is exhaustive (though I did not find it exhausting). I consider myself basically an heir to the Enlightenment perspective.
Perhaps I will start another mega thread for the books I'll read in 2022. This one might be getting hard to load ...
Or not. 2022-02-15: Yesterday I finished Sue Roe's In Montparnasse; the emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali.
I'd long been curious about the cultural community that formed around writer/philosopher Andre Breton. Breton was a Marxist. He was conscripted in 1914 to fight in World War I at (I believe) the age of 17 or 18. He was very young anyway. And it turns out that he opposed that war from the very beginning and rejected the mindless patriotism that consumed many other people at the time. Surrealism was already a vague idea by the time Breton created the deliberate Surrealist movement. It was partly in response to what he eventually saw as the futility of constant protest of Dadaism. He thought Surrealism would help access the subconscious and somehow make people full of curiosity and love and therefore immune to the hideous rationalism that caused WW I.
(I've never understood those artists who blamed rationalism for wars. The truth as I see it is that we humans employ rational thought to achieve our desires (which, being desires are animalistic and not rational). Most of the "causes" or "ideals" that produce wars and fascist wars are irrational. The fact that someone can employ deliberate, rational thought to implement an irrational goal seems patently obvious.)
So how Breton eventually ended up working with a materialist proto-fascist like Salvador Dali was a mystery to me. Breton had decided (from exposure to the works of Max Ernst and others) that visual arts were a legitimate way to communicate the subconscious. (Breton had met Freud but both men were unimpressed with the other.) Roe describes a whole cast of curious characters. Leading ones include Picasso, Paul Eluard and Gala, Jean Cocteau (despised by Breton), Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and others. I was disappointed that Yves Tanguy was merely mentioned once and his wife, the US-American artist Kay Sage, not at all. (When I was in art school we had to do a presentation on a Surrealist artist. For some reason almost everybody else was determined to write about Dali. I looked for another artist and decided that I like Tanguy's work and did my presentation on him, to the relief of the instructor in charge.)
2022-02-19
Just finished Ian Davidson's biography of Voltaire. Voltaire: a life.
It was an enjoyable read. As you know, I recently read a history of The Enlightenment wherein Voltaire was a major figure. I've long heard people (mostly men) singing his praises but all I'd ever read from him was Candide. It turns out that he was less of a man and more of a man than I thought he would be. He was a vain, self-absorbed social climber who came from a comfortable background. Although very talented he could be petty and jealous. He was always on the look-out for shady financial opportunities. Indeed, getting in on manipulating a poorly-planned public lottery was the source of his enormous wealth. And, of course, he fucked his niece.
Still, his contributions to rational thinking, freedom of speech and conscience, religious tolerance, the reform of the legal system towards justice and so much more made his presence on this planet a net benefit for us I'd say.
I've also started to read John Brockman's This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future. It wasn't what I was expecting. It's just a series of statements (mostly from scientists, though Alan Alda contributes a pessimistic page or two doubting that humanity will stop trying to kill ourselves) generally from 1-4 pages long (on my e-book reader) saying that this or that important concept or future technology is going to radically transform the ways we look at the world.
I've read about 25 of them and there's still about a hundred more to go through. It would probably be a fun book for someone with a lot of leisure time to read an entry and then spend an hour or two finding out more about it. But I'm reading it on the bus to work or back home where I'll have a few hours to draw and do chores. I'm not going to finish it but I have started a book by one of it's contributors.
2022-03-09
Finished Frank Wilczek's The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.
Wilczek is a good writer. I almost understood much of what he was saying. Apparently "mass" comes out of energy. (A re-writing of the order of operations in Einstein's "e=mc2") And quantum uncertainty means that one has to use a lot energy to get close enough to something sub-atomic (I forget what) in order to find out something you want to know about it. Apparently what's meant by "The Grid" is full of quantum fields ... the probabilities of where electrons, quarks, gluons, ... and gravity (?) are. As I said: I almost get it. I almost get the concepts. It would help if I had any mathematical ability but I'm not wired that way sadly.
I also finished Robert Gerwath's Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich.
Reinhard Heydrich had always lurked off to the side whenever I read about World War II. He was Himmler's deputy. He was in charge of the Wannsee Conference where the mechanics of the Holocaust were hammered out. He was put in charge of the Czech lands as "The Protector of Bohemia and Moravia" where he was assasinated by British-trained Czech resistance fighters. As the review above says, Gerwarth's is a scholarly account that provides illumination of the actual creation and functioning of the Nazi police-state. It was depressing reading and I kept hoping he'd be killed. (Gerwarth actually starts the book with the assasination itself, but I just hated the guy the more I read about him.)
2022-03-17
David Sedaris A Carnival of Snackery
I didn't really know what this was going to be when I checked it out as an e-book. It turns out that (as you can see on a larger image of the cover) that it's from his diaries from 2003 to 2020. If you didn't know David Sedaris you would think that's a waste of time. But once you consider that much of what Sedaris writes is autobiographical and mainly his brilliantly funny way of describing everyday events and his reaction to them (learned mostly from his mother's stories to her family around the kitchen table but probably also from his father who had his own cutting sense of humour) you realize that there's gold in them thar hills.
Chuck Collins The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millionaires to Hide Trillions.
Anna Abraham, Leonardo da Vinci
2022-03-22
Finished Best Canadian Stories 2017, (John Metcalf editor).
This was a change of pace for me. I've decided that I'm too stupid at the moment to read explanations of quantum physics for laypeople. I don't want to read about WW2 anymore. So much bores me these days. I didn't want to get a novel out because I tend to not be able to put them down if they're good. So I thought short-stories from my fellow Canadians would divert me.
"Old Growth" by Lisa Alward is about a woman seeing what a tool her ex-husband is.
"Cherry Sun" by Frankie Barnet is about an adventurous young woman at a small zoo dealing with a sexually dormant capybara.
"Beasts" by Grant Buday is about a rough rustic early-modern French peasant, courier du bois who returns home with an enigmatic dancing bear.
"Funny Hat" is a searing account of a woman dealing with a stillbirth.
"Ryan and Irene, Irene & Ryan" was, for me, confusing, but I eventually figured out it's about a woman who is a manager for a charismatic female musician and this female musician has an impetuous boyfriend.
"No. 10" seemed a little contrived at times, but overall it painted a convincing portrait of a man and his parents who are/were full of contradictions.
"Calm" by Cynthia Flood is about an adolescent boy following some police horses because he admires their strength and calm.
"Suture" by David Huebert was one of my favourites, dealing with the inner dialogue of an earnest, idealistic young man.
"The Last Trumpet" by K.D. Miller I also liked. A widower reflects on his deceased wife and his obligations to her memory.
"The Shoe Emporium" by Lisa Moore was a very dramatic account of three desperate characters working in a shoestore in Newfoundland.
"Shimmer" by Alex Pugsley is an almost convincing account of two teenaged girls (one of whom has "the best tits in grade eleven") at a party.
"Currents" by Beverly Shaw was a nice little story about an older man at a particular stage in his life encountering three charismatic people at the hotel he works at.
"Next of Kin" by Anne Marie Todkill was a well-written story about a young woman with a depressed mother, a strong-willed older sister, and a happy-go-lucky female friend of the family with her own backstory.
"Miss Charlotte" confused me. As near as I can tell a disagreeable Vancouver matron meets a distraught teenaged runaway boy. He's fled an abusive rural household and has (I think) killed someone who tried to rape him. She takes him to a beauty parlour run by a Chinese-Canadian woman that appears to be operating illegally (?) There's lots of other older women there who think they're still glamourous and they talk about the boy as if he's a sex-toy (or so it seemed to me). It's 1939 and the Depression is still on but I think war drums are in the air. She sends him to a store to get some stuff and he doesn't rip her off. He wants to join the navy and after they all condemn him for it she agrees to sign for him as he's too young to do it himself.
2022-04-01
Finished Yanis Varoufakis's The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, & the Future of the Global Economy (2nd ed.)
I'll let Mr. Varoufakis's publishers describe it for you:
In this remarkable and provocative book, Yanis Varoufakis explodes the myth that financialisation, ineffectual regulation of banks, greed and globalisation were the root causes of the global economic crisis. Rather, they are symptoms of a much deeper malaise which can be traced all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929, then on through to the 1970s: the time when a ‘Global Minotaur’ was born. Just as the Athenians maintained a steady flow of tributes to the Cretan beast, so the ‘rest of the world’ began sending incredible amounts of capital to America and Wall Street. Thus, the Global Minotaur became the ‘engine’ that pulled the world economy from the early 1980s to 2008.
Today’s crisis in Europe, the heated debates about austerity versus further fiscal stimuli in the US, the clash between China’s authorities and the Obama administration on exchange rates are the inevitable symptoms of the weakening Minotaur; of a global ‘system’ which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced. Going beyond this, Varoufakis lays out the options available to us for reintroducing a modicum of reason into a highly irrational global economic order.
An essential account of the socio-economic events and hidden histories that have shaped the world as we now know it.
I found it to be readable and insightful. For instance; I knew that the US financial sector benefited from the OPEC countries putting their oil revenues in Wall Street and that the Saudis and the Iran of the Shah also spent their petro-dollars on US weapons sales. But I don't think any other writer pointed out how German and Japanese trade surpluses with the USA were also mitigated by their having to purchase higher-priced oil in US dollars.
2022-04-17
I just finished William Craig's Enemy at the Gates: The Battle For Stalingrad.
Apparently it's not the work of a professional historian. Still, it's full of research including research with the survivors of the battle. It's very readable and Craig does a good job of using the stories of several recurring characters, both high and low, to explain this vast story.
2022-04-23
I finished three books over the past few days. The first one was Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliot Trudeau 1968-2000 by John English.
It's the second part of English's biography of Trudeau. I was two years old when Trudeau became prime minister and I was an adolescent during the first Quebec Referendum and in high school when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into law. So Trudeau as prime minister was a big part of my formative years. And this book brought it all back.
As a cynical, jaded person I can't really say that I find it too important whether Quebec stayed in Canada or not. Canadians proved themselves unworthy of self-praise when we tolerated stephen harper's war crimes and election fraud. But if you do find Canadian unity to be important, then I'd say Trudeau was crucial for that. I think his efforts to make Canada (or at least Ottawa) bilingual were a good thing. His use of the War Measures Act appears to have broken the back of the terrorist tactics of Quebec separatistes.
I don't know if his advocacy for a stronger federal government (as opposed to the "head-waiter to the provinces" that he said was represented by Joe Clark's "community of communities" or Brian Mulroney's Meech Lake or Charlottetown Accord) was the better option.
One thing that struck me was how the economic crises of the 1970's were being used by the business community and right-wing ideologues to start in earnest their campaign to destroy the welfare state. John English was a Liberal MP at one time. He's got a pretty comfortable income as an academic. It's clear that he sides more with the pro-business liberalism of John Turner and Jean Chretien than with Trudeau's more interventionist philosophy. Even still, despite his sympathetic presentation of the nitwit ideas of Margaret Thatcher and the C.D. Howe Institute, the reality is that those "pro-business" people got everything they were clamouring for in the 1970's and we see the disastrous results today.
Speaking of those disastrous results, I also finished Yanis Varoufakis's And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future.
Building upon the idea of the Economic Minotaur from his earlier book (see aFifew entries above) Varoufakis goes into detail about the faulty way that the European Union's officials responded to the 2008 financial crisis. The main reason for Europe's bad response comes from the deluded, technocratic architecture of the European Union itself and its unifying currency, the Euro.
First of all, the Great Depression of the 1930's ended the first era of globalization. This period's demise began in 1914 with the disruption of the First World War and the economic consequences that made the 1920's such an unstable decade. The Great Depression produced a vicious economic and political crisis in Germany that brought Hitler to power and produced the Second World War. At the end of that conflict the United States was the supreme world power and it would be US-Americans who would build the postwar world.
These US-Americans were Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Dealers" who saw the necessity of some state management of the market economy (including support for worker unionization) as necesssary to produce stability. The European Union began under US-American guidance and things like the European Coal & Steel Community sought to remove competition for these resources from between the nation-states and their capitalist firms and place their allocation into the hands of technocratic officials in Brussells. Varoufakis argues that this became the basis for the rest of the subsequent European project. Decisions were increasingly removed from national legislatures with at least some democratic aspects, to supposedly rational, objective, professional bureaucrats.
During the late-1940's to the mid-1960's the USA kept the world economy chugging along by using its trade surpluses to finance European and Japanese reconstruction and to serve as a market for Japanese (and especially German) industrial exports. The USA's growing Cold War deficits (including the Vietnam War) and declining competitiveness undercut the era of fixed exchange rates and caused the USA to abandon the Gold Standard.
This led to the birth of what Varoufakis calls the "Economic Minotaur." This creature was a US economy that could post massive government and trade deficits year-after-year while still attracting investors from all over the world who would invest in Wall Street. Throughout these years, US capitalists attacked labour's share of the economy and implemented increasingly deregulation and lower taxes on profits and wealth. US-American firms could halve the cost of their wages by building factories in Latin America and Asia while plowing the profits into financial speculation (including stock buy-backs) or as derivatives.
Varoufakis argues that Germany and Japan should have recycled their trade surpluses for the good of the international economy, instead they built them up and built them up, until Japan's economy was overwhelmed by hot money and Germany just continued to build up surpluses.
This is taking too long. It's a good book. But I do have a problem with how Varoufakis seems to paint US officials as being smarter than they were, .... as if they weren't just improvising and keeping a constant eye on their own short-term self-interest until it all blew-up in their faces. More: Varoufakis appears to paint Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker as somewhat of a sage and (bizarrely) a hero. T'was Volcker who called for a "controlled disintegration" of the Postwar economic order. Volcker raised interest rates to stratospheric levels in order to crush workers, inflationary expectations arising from the Iranian Revolution and attract foreign capital (to the high interest).
Varoufakis describes the impact of the 2008 crisis on Europe and shows how the anti-democratic creation of the Euro (which had always been made to serve German [elite's] economic interests) made the poorest European economies suffer needlessly and cruelly. Better than most people, Varoufakis shows how the economic fall-out from the stupid policies of Europe's anti-democratic leadership are producing a new rise in fascism.
Finally, I finished Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity.
Here's the author's blog-post about it. I liked it even though I thought the connections between the Mediterranean and China were very tenuous. It describes the political changes affecting Greece and Rome as well as the (now) "Middle East" created by the conquests of Alexander the Great, on through to India and China. My knowledge of ancient India and China are rudimentary but Scott is an accessible writer and I'm sure I've retained more than I usually do. There's discussion throughout all these places of the best form of government (democracy, monarchy, republican, Confucian, legalist) as well as the later chapters on the political uses of religion and the impact of religions on their societies.
2022-05-31
One time I thought about writing a screenplay for a WW2 film. As I was researching the topic I saw a photo of a nice looking woman and the caption said she was Kay Summersby who had been Dwight Eisenhower's driver and rumoured lover. "Interesting!" I thought. I wondered what that story was.
So, a few weeks ago I was at the library and saw in the Books For Sale section a little hardcover Ike & Kay for sale for 2 bucks. I wasn't wearing my glasses, but thought 'What the hell' and bought it. When I got home I was a tad disappointed to find out it was a fictionalized telling of the affair. Still, it did provide some more information. For instance, Ms. Summersby was present for the German surrender and can be seen smiling behind Eisenhower holding the pens in a V-shape:
That was the image that was shown in European newspapers but she was edited out of the US-American newspapers. Stuff like that.
Anyhow, reading this book I realized I didn't know much about Eisenhower. Whatever else he was he was an important man. So I elected to read Jean Edward Smith's 2012 biography Eisenhower in War and Peace. It's very well-written. Smith is quite fair when describing Eisenhower's (and most other US-American generals') shortcomings vis-a-vis the more experienced British. (This is actually the first book of the several I've read about WWII that documents just why General (later Field Marshal) Alan Brooke felt superior to them. (It was primarily lack of experience. British officers were inferior to German officers but by late-1942 the best of them had enough practical experience to make them far more effective than the bulk of the untried US-Americans.)
Up until fairly recently it was believed that Eisenhower was an empty suit as President, dominated by more opinionated, intellectual-types like John Foster Dulles. The declassification of the documents of the Eisenhower presidency showed this was not the case and that "Ike" was clearly Dulles' boss.
My big complaint is that Smith never explains why Eisenhower (who seemed so tolerant of people with communist ideas because he had so much faith in the superiority of US-American capitalism) and who was even on friendly terms with men like Soviet General Zhukov, nevertheless was prepared to form NATO and to engage in high-stakes diplomatic duels to contain the Soviet Union. Smith is such a clear, concise writer I'm sure he could have explained it all in a paragraph or two.
Eisenhower did a lot of damage in Iran, the Congo, Guatamala and elsewhere. On the other hand he should be credited for having opposed the use of the Atomic Bomb as soon as he heard about it. For refusing suggestions that he himself use the bomb in Vietnam during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and against China during the Formosoan Crisis of 1958. Eisenhower truly hated war and he had the stature to reject his military's desire for a major offensive in the Korean War. He brought that war to an end and did not start any new ones. And, of course, he warned his country of the dangers of the "Military Industrial Complex" in his farewell address.
2022-06-06
Just finished The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom. Kind of funny how I ended up reading it: I had to return Stephen Nadler's Think Least of Death: Spinoza On How To Live And How To Die because other people were waiting for it. But I put on the e-reader that I wanted to borrow it again when it became available. A few days later Yalom's book showed up for me on my e-reader asking if I wanted to borrow it. Thinking it was the Nadler book, I signed it out. Oh well.
The Spinoza Problem was a good read. I don't know if anybody talks like the characters in the book but it is a story about applying philosophy to one's own life. Its portrait of Spinoza synchs with what I've read of him. And the anti-Semite Nazi "philosopher" Rosenberg seems to adequately reflect the limitations of the historical figure.
Nadler's Think Least of Death is a good summary of Spinoza's guide to life. In the end it's similar to many Greek philosophers in its final results, but it differs in how it justifies itself.
2022-06-19
Finished Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale.
Someone said this book was too long. Too much detail about people who weren't Titian. I say: Get used to disappointment. We need more of this shit. We also need more books with images of actual Titian paintings or the best copies. I've been reading about this era fairly steadily because I'm interested in Renassaiance artists and, also, Florentine and Venetian republicanism. Anyway, for a guy like me there's plenty of discussion of Europe in the late-15th, early-16th centuries.
2022-06-30
Just finished Ian Haydn Smith's Cult Filmmakers: 50 movie mavericks you need to know.
From the review:
WHAT MAKES A CULT FILMMAKER?
Whether pioneering in their craft, fiercely and undeniably unique, or critically divisive, cult filmmakers come in all shapes and guises. Some gain instant fame, others instant notoriety, and more still remain anonymous until a chance change in fashion sees their work propelled into the limelight.
In this nifty little book, Ian Haydn-Smith handpicks a selection of brilliant directors you should know - from industry heavyweights like Tim Burton and David Lynch, to the strange and surreal imaginings of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ana Lily Amirpour. Discover the minds behind such beloved features as Melancholia, Easy Rider, Lost in Translation and more. From little knowns with small, devout followings, to superstars walking the red carpet, each is special in their individuality and their ability to inspire, antagonise and delight.
Cult Filmmakers is an essential addition to any film buff's archive, as well as an entertaining introduction to the weird and wonderful world of cinema.
Also in the series: Cult Artists, Cult Musicians + Cult Writers
The filmmakers:
Ana Lily Amirpour, Kenneth Anger, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Mario Bava, Kathryn Bigelow, Anna Biller, Lizzie Borden, Tim Burton, John Carpenter, Park Chan-Wook, Benjamin Christensen, Vera Chytilova, Sofia Coppola, Roger Corman, Alex Cox, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Amat Escalante, Abel Ferrara, Georges Franju, Lucio Fulci, Terry Gilliam, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Dennis Hopper, King Hu, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Barbara Loden, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Russ Meyer, Oscar Micheaux, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noe, Gordon Parks, George A. Romero, Ken Russell, Susan Seidelman, Seijun Suzuki, Larisa Shepitko, Quentin Tarantino, Melvin van Peebles, Lars von Trier, John Waters, Nicolas Winding Refn, Edward D. Wood Jr., Brian Yuzna.
It's a nice little book. Talks about some people I know but a lot of directors I didn't know. North American, European, and Asian. Here's a well-regarded work by a woman director Barbara Loden, "Wanda":
Next up: I'm quite a ways into Mary Hollingsworth's The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty. But two people are waiting for it so it'll disappear from my phone tomorrow. I'm on Chapter 16. It's a very good book. Clearly, artfully written. Really shows you what assholes they were without being to subjectively judgemental.
I think I'm starting to get a handle on Renaissance Italy. For instance, French King Charles XII (?) invaded Italy (to conquer Naples) in 1494. That's when Florence overthrew Piero Medici, the scalawag son of the spendthrift Lorenzo the Magnificent (who Hollingsworth says didn't have a sculpture garden wherein talented youngsters like Michelangelo were schooled). The Sack of Rome by Charles V's troops was in 1527.
2022-07-09
I finished Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
I subscribe to Dr. Hossenfelder's YouTube channel "Science Without the Gobbledygook" ever since I watched a well-presented explanation about how atoms were first formed. So when I saw she had a book I was very interested in reading it. Here's quotes from the review:
Hossenfelder’s main concern is the difficult current state of theoretical fundamental physics, sometimes referred to as a “crisis” or “nightmare scenario”. She is writing at what is likely to be a decisive moment for the subject: the negative LHC results for popular speculative models are now in. What effect will these have on those who have devoted decades to studying such models?
Back in 2006 Lee Smolin and I published books concerned about where fundamental physics was heading, and five years ago Jim Baggott’s Farewell to Reality appeared with another take on these issues. Hossenfelder’s is the first book on this topic to appear since the LHC results showing a vanilla Standard Model Higgs and no evidence of supersymmetry or other speculative BSM physics. The remarkable thing she has done is to address this in a characteristically direct manner: go talk to those responsible and ask them what they have to say for themselves.
Four of the people that Hossenfelder interviews would be on any short list of the most influential figures in theoretical particle physics, both responsible for where we are now by their past actions, and looked to by others for a vision of where the field is going next. They are Nima Arkani-Hamed, Steven Weinberg, Frank Wilczek, and Joe Polchinski.
For my part, Hossenfelder explains complicated things very well. There were about three times where I gave up and just skimmed ahead but that is because I am particularly incompetent when it comes to hard science. But so often I was able to follow the summaries of the issues.
Paul Dirac believed that things that were true were often so because they were "beautiful." By that he meant elegant equations that said a lot with very little and which didn't have loose ends left over. Hossenfelder says that isn't a scientific attitude. And the fact that so many physicists use beauty as a criteria might be blinding them to other possibilities. And, it seems that physics is in a state of crisis.
I'd type more but I don't want to.
I'm going to return Frank N. Egerton's Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel because I'm just not getting into it. I've read from the Ancient Middle East to the Islamic world's writers on issues to do with the natural world. Aristotle was a big deal though much of what he said was wrong. It's just a lot of names of people I'd never heard of saying things that weren't true for the most part. But it's probably someone's cup of tea.
There you go.
2022-07-14
I think I'll keep putting entries here until the end of December, whereupon I will make a yearly Book Depository for 2023. (Assuming that both I and human civilization will continue to exist.)
I finished Jerry Kosinski's Being There. Hmmm. Anyways, I'd enjoyed the movie so when this showed up somehow in one of my searches for a non-fiction title I read it. It's a slight little thing. I'd love it if I could write something like this and become rich and famous.
I also just finished Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II.
As you're all well aware I recently read a biography of Eisenhower. (See above.) His memoir of the war years was described in glowing terms for its diplomacy and tact but also for its value as a historical source. Eisenhower is very diplomatic. He also never mentions Kate Summersby at all. He does a good job of masking his self-praise. I've read much more about the British, then the Canadian, then the Russian, then the German accounts of the war. Probaby as a response to having grown up under the US-American hegemony wherein they took credit for almost everything. It's a worthy book.
2022-07-21
Finished Casey Schwartz's In The Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of NeuroPsychoanalysis.
Schwartz is a Freudian and Freud's theories about the mind aren't very popular nowadays. [Indeed, some would say they've been totally discredited and that the man himself was a charlatan.] But Schwartz argues that at least Freud had a theory of Mind. The "whole" that was greater than the sum of its parts. The "parts" being the neurons and sections of the brain that are seen to light up when different kinds of thinking are taking place. According to Schwartz, neuroscience studies the brain but breaks it up into isolated parts and only deals with isolated actions and responses. Theories of Mind talk about depression, narcissism, desire, anger, suicide, joy. Neuroscience is important but unhelpful for the treatment of actual human beings. (Occassionally neuroscientists make a discovery and begin to think the whole secret is about to be revealed but then the limitations of what they've found becomes evident and the discoveries cease.)
Writing of the struggle to “bring some of the old ideas about the mind into the new landscape of the brain, journalist Schwartz has the background to explore these questions: a master’s degree course combining psychoanalysis, taught the first year at the Anna Freud Centre in London, and neuroscience, taught the following year at Yale. After a bow to Freud and his followers, Schwartz focuses on two men: Mark Solms, both a psychoanalyst and a neurosurgeon, coiner of the term “neuropsychoanalysis,” translator of Freud, and founder of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society; and David Silvers, not a psychiatrist but a practicing analyst, who has as a patient an aphasic stroke victim—i.e., a man who has lost the ability to speak. Schwartz follows Solms’ working and writing lives and includes some fascinating stories about his experiences and those of others working with brain-damaged men and women. She then connects with Silvers, who has been treating a man seemingly unreachable by psychoanalytic technique, a man whose case seems to offer the possibility of a bridge between psychoanalytic ideas and neuroscientific ones.
Schwartz is an engaging writer and her subjects are interesting people. But I read for a long time wondering when she was going to make a connection between the neuroscience and its application via Freudian psychology. Like, halfway through the book I'm still waiting for a demonstration of "neuropsychoanalysis." With Silvers's patient we really don't see anything. Silvers decides that the man is lonely, that he laments the lack of a relationship with his niece (the only child of his only sibling, a deceased sister) and that he obtains some comfort from his sessions because Silvers is making an effort to try to communicate with him. There's nothing really Freudian that I can see going on. Where a patient is allowed to speak freely and the psychoanalyst looks for clues about repressed sexual urges or evidence of past traumas.
I also finished Chester Brown's graphic novel Louis Riel.
It's a very concise telling of Riel's leadership of the Metis. Being so, it really exposes the cynicism and opportunism and bigotry of John A. Macdonald. The artwork is beautiful. One also appreciates the military abilities of Gabriel Dumont.
2022-07-27
I've read about a quarter of The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby and Ted Remade America's Empire, by Lawrence J. Haas.
I shan't be continuing it. After I downloaded it I saw that it was praised by shit-head Senator Joe Lieberman. (Right-wing Democrat/Zionist/Pro-Profit-Gouging Murderous Health Insurance Industry). It's pretty hilarious. Haas describes the Kennedy's almost as a family of demi-gods with the boys conditioned by the tough, demanding, challenging love of their father to become the very best that their superior DNA could make them be.
What I saw was a bunch of rich boys raised by an anti-Semite blowhard who (while no doubt not enjoying easy childhoods for reasons you can find out for yourselves if you're so inclined) were given every opportunity to become members of the ruling class. John F. Kennedy ("Jack") has had years (since a teenager really) to pontificate about the need for the USA to assume "world leadership" against an exaggerated Soviet threat. He admits to not giving a shit about domestic policy seeing the megalomaniac opportunities in playing a game of Risk with actual human lives. Then he fucks up the Bay of Pigs operation and (between crying jags) blames everything on his subordinates. Whatever one thinks of the Bay of Pigs idea, it's crucial that Haas omits Kennedy's decision to deny it air-support (in a futile hope of obscuring the USA's involvement). For John F. Kennedy to preen and yammer about his mastery of foreign policy chops and then claim he was overwhelmed by the reputations of the planners of the previous administration is a little pathetic.
I'm at the part now where Haas is distorting the nature of Robert Kennedy's "Alliance For Progress" which involved US investment in export agriculture in Latin America (to the detriment of food crops which meant starvation) and the building of death squad infrastructure (to suppress the inevitable discontent) as described by Chomsky here. Haas continues to write as if the Kennedys' hyperventilating about the Soviet threat wasn't ridiculous.
2022-07-30
I finished Eliot Weisman's The Way It Was: My Life With Frank Sinatra a few days ago. It's co-authored by Jennifer Valoppi.
I wanted to read something light and when I saw this in my e-book browser I thought it would be fun to read about Sinatra's "Rat-Pack" years and find out what they were all about. Except that Weisman didn't meet Sinatra until the mid-1970's. In fact, this infamous photo:
... was taken at a theatre/restaurant complex that Weisman co-owned. Weisman had been the son of wealthy businessman and was himself trained as an accountant. He opened the dinner theatre with some golfing buddies one of whom turned out to be mob-connected. Because of the constant "skimming" from the restaurant side of the business it became a money-losing operation from the get-go. Weisman says that he always made sure the performers got paid though. (I have no idea how truth-based as opposed to self-aggrandizing Weisman's account of his story is. From here on I'll just relate what he says in the book.)
Because of Sinatra and all the mobsters the FBI became quite interested in the place. The place went bankrupt and at some point Weisman was arrested. Weisman says that all the irregularities took place in the food and beverages section which was not his purview. He also knew better than to inform on mobsters for the FBI. He kept his mouth shut and was sent to prison. At first it was supposed to be for seven years. Then Rudy Giuliani (working for a big NYC law-firm) got it reduced and then it got reduced again when Weisman provided expert advice (on accounting and other business fraud methods in cases unrelated to his own) to the FBI.
Somehow or other, while in prison, Weisman was able to set up bookings for Sinatra's tours. After he got out of prison Sinatra's manager quit and Weisman took over. Sinatra, at his lofty perch, had no idea (or little idea) of what Weisman had gone through, but after he found out, he was very grateful and began to more and more take Weisman into his confidence.
Weisman has Sinatra make a tour of Italy ... no, wait, ... that was the other manager. That tour was a success as far as attendance and performances went. But it lost money. Maybe because the manager booked for them to stay in an Italian castle without air-conditioning and Sinatra decided instead on a fancy hotel on the French Riviera which meant chartering planes to get to their concerts.
Several times, when Sinatra didn't like a place, he'd say: "You got a camera? Then take a picture of this place because we're never coming back."
Ack. This was just a light read. Suffice to say, if Weisman's personal account is to be believed, then he was a good manager who did well for all of his clients. He played an honest broker between Sinatra's kids and his last wife. (The kid's owned Sinatra's name and his recordings up to the 1970's. Weisman made sure that the tours and the "Duets" recordings would allow Barbara Sinatra to live in luxury after Frank's passing.) He brought Liza Minelli from a net worth of 0 to $15 million. He had started Sammy David Jr. off from the path of insolvency to security but a diagnosis of throat cancer destroyed those plans. (Sinatra cried when he heard about his death.) He saved Don Rickles from mobsters (with a little help from a phone number given to him by Sinatra himself). There's a great section where Weisman has to deal with Donald Trump.
Sinatra comes across as something of a spoiled, stuffed shirt. Weisman tries to portray him as incredibly charismatic, loyal, warm, and a great humanitarian. Whatever my doubts, I have to say Weisman's summary of his contribution to the last decade of Sinatra's career and financial success is probably accurate.
2022-08-03
I've been a little busy and some of these didn't get finished. I'll see if this link works:
I got about two-thirds through this one but other people were waiting for it so I returned it. Marshall talks with a lot of communications experts and psychologists and sociologists and etc., and explains why the strategy for getting the masses united behind doing something about the environment has been failing to generate the level of passionate committment necessary to make the politicians actually move. I think he's (so far) downplayed the fact of deliberate corporate obstructionism and political-economic power a bit too much. I'd like to finish it at some point.
Hitler: Military Commander: Matthews, Rupert: 9781510733947: Books - Amazon.ca
I thought this was a pretty fair book. Matthews shows that Hitler had been an exceptional soldier in WWI and how a planned retreat of the German front-line to a more defensible position in (I think) 1917 at times turned into a panicked rout seared itself into Hitler's psyche and would later produce his "no-retreats" mentality. This even might have saved the Germans from a major collapse in the aftermath of the Battle of Moscow. It also seemed to work for the Germans in the face of the Soviets' "Operation Mars." This book was the first place I ever heard that Hitler had anything to do with the German capture of Fort Eben-Emael. If that's true then that's pretty impressive.
In the end though, Hitler's lack of interest in naval warfare, his ignorance of the uses of air power beyond infantry and tank support, and his increasing megalomania and delusion caused him to squander everything. Thank heavens.
Dean and Me: A Love Story by Jerry Lewis (goodreads.com)
I'd gotten out that Frank Sinatra book (see above) partly because I wanted to read about the "Rat Pack" years. Then I thought about Dean Martin and ended up finding this book by Jerry Lewis with James Kaplan. As a kid I knew of Jerry Lewis in "The Nutty Professor" and Dean Martin from his TV shows. I'd heard they used to be a comedy team but had no knowledge of their act. So I thought that I'd read this book.
Apparently Jerry Lewis had a failing act, a semi-vaudeville bit (his parents were in vaudeville) of miming along to records. (He was 19 years old.) Dean Martin was a Bing Crosby-style crooner who was almost thirty. One night, Lewis pranked on Martin during his act and Martin played along and the audience loved it. Later on, Lewis found himself playing a club in Atlantic City and one of the other acts was a no-show. Lewis asked them to call Dean Martin from NYC. Martin came down and sang and didn't impress anybody. In desperation Lewis came up with a routine where they'd do their "monkey-straight man" routine and it was a hit. It was 1946.
Apparently it was a HUGE hit. Eventually (even accounting for all the self-aggrandizement on Lewis's part you could imagine) they were rock-star huge. Lewis credits Martin for his genius as a straight-man. One night, Lewis was trying everything to interrupt Martin's singing. He had someone cut all the lights in the club. Martin pulled out his lighter and held it to his face as he continued singing.
Lewis takes a fair share of the blame for their acrimonius split in 1956. He says it was ego, misunderstandings, insecurities, and creative frustrations that led to it. But the whole book is Lewis expressing his little brother like love for Martin. (They reconciled towards the end but never performed together again.)
The book is also interesting for an account of the criminal ownership of most of the big entertainment venues at the time. According to Lewis, Sinatra got a kick out of hanging out with these guys BECAUSE they were criminals, and it almost got him into a lot of trouble. It lost him the friendship with the Kennedys. Martin and Lewis were cordial to the men they had to deal with, with Lewis going so far as to say that one-on-one they were always fair to him. There were two occasions where they got in the faces of lower-level mobsters. Once Lewis joked about a guy in the audience who turned out to be a gangster. The gangster threatened Lewis later at the bar and Dean Martin (who could punch hard enough that he tried being a professional boxer early in life) clocked him. Higher-up mobsters made sure it got no further. Another night, Martin began crooning specifically to a pretty girl in the audience only her boyfriend was an unstable gangster (like Joe Pesci's character in "Goodfellas" says Lewis, only much bigger) who pulled a gun on Martin in the washroom. Lewis got between them and abased himself saying it would never happen again and the crook let them off with a warning.
Lewis goes on and on about his and Martin's philandering. One thinks about their long-suffering wives and how they must have suffered. I get the impression that if any woman tried to get some side-action on these guys their reaction would not have been understanding.
I also finished Walter Dean Myers' Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary.
I've known about Malcolm X for a long time obviously. I knew that he'd been in prison for a crime of some sort. That he'd joined the Nation of Islam. That he rejected non-violence. Perhaps because of this book I'd heard the phrase "By any means necessary." I think he was the one who said "If someone puts a hand on you, put him in the cemetary." I knew he was assassinated because of some murky power-struggle having to do with the Nation of Islam, but I didn't know much about it.
So when I saw this available as an e-book I decided to get a better idea about this important figure. It's a very lean telling of his life. A very quick read. But it does a good job of laying out the structure and the important moments in his life. You get a real sense of the way US society produced him. I'm not into supremacism of any sort. But for some oppressed peoples, separatism is sometimes necessary for at least a certain period of time.
Finally, I got halfway through Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.
Five people were waiting to read it so I sadly returned it unfinished. I'd really like to own this book.
JIM HOLT IS AN EXPERT AT NOTHING. He has gone on a world tour of modern philosophers, physicists, theologians, and writers, and asked them a question that is, he writes, “so profound it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Holt visited esteemed thinkers — Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Adolf Grünbaum, and John Updike — in their natural habitats, places like Oxford or Café de Flore in Paris. Holt presents their theories in Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story in a manner a layperson could grasp, and with wit and dry humor a cynic can appreciate. A philosopher, author, and essayist, Holt gives these great minds physical bodies, allowing his readers a glimpse into the lives of our own endangered species — humans that think for a living.
...
Why Does the World Exist? is a comprehensive rundown of philosophers’ and scientists’ views on the topic of being and nothingness throughout history, and at the same time Holt manages to discuss nothingness in the very relatable here-and-now. He describes the experience of riding in the backseat of Grünbaum’s car: the head of the great but tiny philosopher barely reaches above the steering wheel, and he is completely oblivious to traffic and angry honks of surrounding cars. Meanwhile, Holt contemplates his own potential transformation to nothingness as a result of a horrible car crash. But Grünbaum, the great rejectionist, thinks that the question — why is there a world rather than nothing at all — is a pseudo-problem. Grünbaum rejects nothingness as a Christian concept stemming from the idea that God brought the world into existence out of pure nothing.
The part about Grünbaum was funny. I think he's someone (among quite a few so far) that I'd like to read more from. Grünbaum thinks reality/existence/the universe/whatever is a brute fact and not worth worrying about. I think it's a fine mystery to ponder.
I found myself agreeing mostly with what David Deutsch said. I also don't think Holt gave him his proper due. Deutsch definitely did NOT say it was "turtles all the way down." He said that when we solve one mystery another one (or more) will confront us.
2022-08-23
Finished Peter Aughton's The Story of Astronomy.
It was a good read. Especially for a simpleton such as myself. Up until the mid-19th Century the story is basically vignettes of individual astronomers that is very easy to follow. Then there's more science than portraits but I was still able to follow most of it.
2022-09-03
I was looking for what the TPL had available in ebook form about "Canadian Art" and one of the few offerings was Anything But a Still Life: The Art & Lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak by Nathan M. Greenfield. I'd never heard of them before but that didn't surprise me. When I went to art school a lot of our professors were from the UK and they would always mention someone to us and we'd gaze back at them with incomprehension and they'd often say (without any hint of condescension) "Famous Canadian artist?"
Anyhow, here's a post I made showing some of their art.
As for the book, it was kind of interesting. One really got a sense of what a cultural wasteland Canada was in the early 20th Century. Bruno Bobak was born in Poland but his family returned to Canada when he was very young (they'd been there and returned and then headed back) and he eventually found himself in Hamilton, Ontario during the Great Depression. They stole from piles of potatoes that were being dumped in the harbour to maintain the potato price in order to survive. Bruno's doodlings at school were discouraged by his teachers as a waste of time. His mother left the family and eventually Bruno's father moved to Toronoto for work and Bruno ended up at a downtown school that followed Deweyite principles and where his artistic expression was encouraged.
One program saw him at the AGO where the instructor was impressed by him and allowed him to work setting up easels for classes. Doing this got Bruno Bobak much more exposure to other artists and the rest was history.
Molly Lamb's father was a wealthy mining engineer in British Columbia. He was also an amateur photographer and Jack Shadbolt was a frequent guest who became Molly's mentor. Her artistic skills were also encouraged and she was Canada's first official female war artist. That's where she and Bruno met,
They got married and moved to BC. They travelled on government artists' grants and taught in various places in Canada before Bruno got a full-time gig at the University of New Brunswick. Molly would travel away for teaching gigs and to visit family for a month here and there but New Brunswick became their home for the rest of their lives.
The book features a gazillion of tedious descriptions of the couple's works, often without an accompanying illustration. This is another Canadian writer who gives the impression they're being paid by the word. It seems to me that paintings that aren't really ABOUT anything other than a visual experience (such as Molly's many watercolours of flowers) don't really lend themselves to literary descriptions. If you want to explain symbolism or something, or the significance of the figures in a historical painting, fine. But to go into intricate detail about the composition of a floral composition and the bending of the stems and the sunlight on the glass, ... it wasn't for me.
Also, a sketch of a naked fat woman tossed off by a frustrated middle-aged male artist doesn't require a page of text to describe it either.
It wasn't so bad when a really good painting had an illustration and you could appreciate when the writer points out how something was done well.
Much of the book is based on Molly's diaries. They're interesting for a look at the sexual and class politics between these two individuals. Molly was from a comfortable background and was fairly liberal in a lot of ways. She was also a protean feminists of sorts. She was never an activist and really only read about them later in life. Her own experience as a woman in society doesn't sound too bad. With Bruno it was another story. He seems to have made both of them miserable whining about how she dominated him. (She socialized with his openly avowed mistress, Carolyn Cole [singer Holly Cole's mother!] even though she detested her. A strange form of dominating her husband.)
Bruno grew up in extreme poverty and as a result had a fairly conservative, insecure view of the world. He was also a garden-variety sexist of the era.
Whatever his social conservatism, he surprised many when he left a substantial part of his money to New Brunswick homeless shelters.
That's enough for now. I read two other books but I have to get the laundry started.
2022-09-04
I finished James Garvey's The Story of Philosophy: A History of Western Thought (2012). I found it to be a nice, informal discussion of the sweeping subject of Western philosophy. Garvey describes the various eras of Western thought very clearly. I thought the section of analytical philosphy, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, to be unclear, but that might be because I'm stupid.
I also finished Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (Also 2012!)
I thought it was an awesome book. I was 10 in 1976. I had a friend whose older brother was already a senior in highschool. I was reading Marvel Comics myself those days. I prefered them to the staid, stilted characters of DC. My friend got to read his brother's comics from the late-1960's. Which meant that I got to read bizarre Fantastic Four stories drawn by Jack Kirby, featuring characters like Agatha Harkness, who was supposedly the governess of Reed and Susan Richards' son Franklin, as well as one of the surviving Salem Witches and a mentor of the Scarlet Witch. I can't find out who the inker was on that era of FF books but I remember they were dark and evocative.
I really liked the way that Marvel comics were part of a vast, interconnected storyline with a complicated backstory that I only knew glimpses of. I didn't mind not knowing the whole story. Howe's book showed me that this was a big part of Marvel's widescale appeal. Lot's of kids (boys mostly I guess) found that fascinating.
Howe does a really good job of detailing the controversies over creator compensation at Marvel, with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (the creators of the FF, The Hulk, and Spiderman to name only a few). Howe is pretty fair to everyone and there's some very interesting late-life encounters between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby presented. (Interestingly, when Marvel's big-time corporate owners in the 1990's ... or a bit later, I don't remember ... called in Stan Lee and told him his $500,000 annual consulting contract was being renewed at $250,000 a year, Lee took them to court as a "creator" and got a multi-million dollar payoff plus $850,000 annual salary.)
I stopped reading super-hero comics in the mid-1980's. I'd kept reading them because I was a cartoonist but they had started to seem silly. I read them in the 1990's to my oldest boy and therefore I know about the shit-assed "Clone Saga" in Spiderman with "Ben Reilly."
It's just a damned good account of the creative/corporate story. It goes up to the beginning of the successes of the Marvel-themed movies.
2022-09-27
The Disordered Cosmos by Dr. Chandra Prescod-Weinstein.
This was a good book. The first bit Prescod-Weinstein talks about some of the more recent ideas in particle physics, including sub-atomic particles. It was a few weeks ago, but I remember being able to follow it. Much of the rest of the book is a condemnation/critique of the white male hegemony over science. Some of that stuff I agreed with but other stuff I thought was too codemnatory. For instance, did the person who invented the motion detector sensor that we have used via things like soap dispensers in public washrooms say to themselves: "I don't know if this light will register with Black people and the greater melanin in their skin and I don't fucking care!" Or did they think: "I want to deliberately exclude Black people from the human family is this is MY WAY of fucking with them!" Or did they think: "When I think of human beings I only think of White people and the farther away from looking like us you go the less I think of you!" Or maybe it was: "I designed a motion detector and tested it on myself and my colleagues and we thought that 'people' could use it and that included everyone but I overlooked the problem that darker skin absorbs more light and therefore not enough was reflected back to the sensor. And so when we found that out we fixed it."
Are skyscrapers really phallic because male architects are like males everywhere comparing dick sizes? Or was it the case of putting as much useable real-estate on a limited amount of land? (Of course, women NEVER discuss their body parts or think about them. They NEVER think about who is fat, or who has big tits or small tits. And, of course, women NEVER think about guy's dick sizes. Unlike stupid men who think about their penises twenty-two and a half hours out of twenty-four.)
Also, science, whatever the problems of its origins, IS a source of ideas/explanations that are universal across cultures, sexes, time and place. That's the whole source of its appeal.
None of this is to say that Prescod-Weinstein doesn't have important things to say about intentional and unintentional discouragement of women or people of colour or women of colour in science. It is a sad fact that many male scientists have (through sexism and sexual harrassment) made careers in science difficult for women. (She describes her own rape at the hands of an older [unnamed] male colleague and, also, names Neil deGrasse-Tyson as someone who a lot of women have complained about.)
This book provided me with my first encounter with how bad the election of Donald Trump was for a person of colour. Whatever the enormity of Joseph Biden's personal racism and the impact of his racist policing and incarceration policies, the loud-and-proud racism of Trump and his supporters only added to the trauma. Prescod-Weinstein comments ruefully on the shocked reaction of many formerly comfortable scientists to Trump's attacks on science and how those scientists were used to dealing out power and not responding to it. (She talks about the imposition of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii as one example.)
The Begining of Infinity by David Deutsch
I read ebooks on the bus to and from work. And I (like any 21st Century consumer) demand choice. But it's not possible to finish four books in 21 days. At least for me. And someone else always ends up waiting for the book and I can't renew it. So I'm only working on two books at the moment.
I only read 20% of his book. It was a difficult read for me because Deutsch writes provocatively and confidently on such topics as the wrongness of empiricism, reductionism and other reputable concepts. But eventually I had to concede his points. This book is about how human beings can create EXPLANATIONS for things and how, since the Scientific Revolution, we've gotten increasingly better at this process. Furthermore, the human ability to adapt and change explanations works faster than natural selection does at adapting and changing to new environments. If humanity survives, our innovative capacity will become as infinite as the universe itself.
Stalin: Waiting For Hitler 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin.
Another book I didn't get far into. I read the chapter on the famines and halfway into the chapter on cultural issues. Kotkin describes Stalin's childhood as normal whereas others, most notably Simon Sebag Montefiore say that he was constantly beaten by his drunken father and his disciplinarian mother. It has to be either one or the other and either option is important for understanding his character.
Anyway Kotkin does a good job of showing how the famines weren't a policy of ethnic cleansing (specifically against the Ukrainians) but merely the result of Stalin's hubris and delusional thinking. Kotkin provides the numbers showing that Kazach's suffered proportionately more deaths from the USSR's "anti-nomadization" policies than the Ukrainians suffered. Stalin genuinely believed that giant collective farms using tractors would produce much more output than individually managed smaller farms. He believed that "Kulaks" were stubbornly resisting collectivization and stupidly cutting off their nose to spite their face when they killed their own farm animals or sabotaged the sowing and the harvesting. (As if millions of people would starve themselves to death as a form of protest.)
I'd like to finish this book but who knows when that wil happen.
2022-10-13
Finished Seymour Simon's Exoplanets a while ago.
It's just a light, 50-page summary of the issue and of some of the sorts of planets that they've found. With big, full-page artwork in the background of the text. S-okay.
2022-10-14
Finished reading Carl Von Clausewitz's On War today.
So much is made of Clausewitz's line: "War is the continuation of politics by other means" that I really thought his book would be about the great significance of wars, why they're fought, what they mean, how states prepare for war, ... y'know, geo-politics. I was therefore surprised that aside from the small section that line is taken from, the book is mainly a discussion of the realities of combat in the early-19th Century (as well as its differences from, and similarities with past wars).
Clausewitz spends a lot of time explaining (convincingly) why war is more of an art than a science. There's a section on the psychological effects on entire armies of victories and defeats that I found well written. It ends abruptly with a section on night combat. Clausewitz died before he completed his book. I found it a little verbose much of the time.
The edition that I have has an introduction from some British dude who couldn't resist throwing in some comments about how Clausewitz's German ethnicity makes him emblematic of the whole German tendency to war-mongering and WWI & WWII, blah-blah-blah. The next part is by a woman who says she's the guy's wife and how her female limitations blah-blah-blah, and I thought: "Give me a break!" But it turns out she's Marie Von Clausewitz, talking about how she helped finish her husband's book.
There's a lot in it that sounds like common sense for fighting wars. It's more for actual military people than for political people.
2022-10-16
Finished Imagined Life: a speculative journey among the exoplanets in search of intelligent aliens, ice creatures, and supergravity animals by James Trefil and Michael Summers.
I enjoyed it. It was written for people at my knowledge level. They discuss the haziness around the definition of life. They discuss the universal principles of physics and chemistry and how they apply to the possibilities of life on alien worlds. Then they start describing some already discovered exoplanets including an ice world, a water world, a world like Jupiter's moon Europa with an ocean underneath an exterior crust of ice, a tidally-locked world, and a super-earth. Oh yeah. And the multitude of planets in the habitable zone around the "ultra-cool" red dwarf start Trappist-1.
They describe how geography would impact the possible life on these planets. (There's a lot of creatures obtaining energy through chemosynthesis [as opposed to photosynthesis] like Earth's tube worms at deep ocean vents and such. They explain why carbon is the usual suspect for any biological life. Finally they talk about a metallic planet and how it could produce electric waves of such number and complexity that something at least approaching life could be the possible result.
It's a worthwhile read from 2018.
2022-10-29
I finished Batman: Year One about a week ago.
Somebody talked me into drawing a couple of pages for a fan-art parody of this comic so I got on the waiting-list for the ebook. I finished the pages before I got access to the book. (I was given a link to an online page-by-page resource to study the pages I'd been assigned.)
I stopped reading superhero comics a long time ago. It would have been even longer ago except at one time I wanted to make a living drawing them. This wasn't bad. It was more realistic than I thought it would be. The plot moves along nicely and the illustrations are fitting with good compositions and use of light and shade and subdued colours. It was a nice change of pace.
Today I just finished: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.
So, apparently Sheila Heti is a big deal. Because when I looked for a review to link to I see that she's been reviewed by the New York Times, The Guardian and The Paris Review amongst other places and that celebrity-whose-femaleness-is-important Lena Dunham praises her in public.
I read the book because a lovely young woman whom I'm head-over-heels for had it on her Fazebuck page as one of the books she's read. And I do want to read more fiction by female authors. (Many of my favourite non-fiction writers are women. I don't want to type the names out right now but it occurred to me not long ago that perhaps more than half of my go-to writers are wimmen.)
Anyway, this reads as a light, breezy book. "Sheila" the main character (all the characters are based on Heti and people she knows as a WRITER WHO LIVES IN TORONTO) is written as an insecure, often submissive, flighty individual who is aspiring to be a figure of world-historical importance. To do this she tries to absorb the qualities of people in her life who impress her (as well as great writers/whatevers from history).
There's a part at the end where Sheila finds out that her response to hurting her friend Margaux had produced a completely unexpected response/interpretation from Margaux. For me, that was the biggest part of the book.
2022-11-05
Yesterday I finished Tim Blanning's Frederick the Great. Having just finished Clausewitz, I decided I had to learn more about this important historical figure.
I think it's a great biography and I see that at least one other person agrees with me.
What emerges, instead, from these pages is an almost sculptural, three-dimensional rendering of Frederick, one that enables its vast and protean subject to be viewed from a multiplicity of angles – as ruler of Brandenburg-Prussia for almost half a century, as military commander, amateur architect, poet, flautist, composer, librettist, law-reformer, and as atheist and Enlightenment savant (to name but a few) – while never losing sight of how each singular aspect relates to the whole. The result is a biography constantly alert to what Blanning calls the play of ‘light and dark’ in each area of Frederick’s actions: his failures and successes, his vices and virtues, and, in particular, the paradoxes and contradictions of his highly complicated – by turns attractive and repellent – personality. Blanning has produced a supremely nuanced account, abounding in novel assessments and insights, and one which – to its great credit – is destined to confound, in equal measure, Frederick’s parti pris admirers and detractors alike.
...
Tim Blanning is that rarest of scholars, as deft in his command of government and grand strategy as he is in his handling of philosophy and opera, and is rightly regarded as one of Britain’s (indeed Europe’s) finest historians. This biography finds him at the height of his powers and offers major reassessments of almost every aspect of Frederick’s career. If, in the end, we are left in no doubt as to Frederick’s ‘greatness’, it is nevertheless a greatness that is mercurial, astonishingly multifaceted, and as complex in its flaws as in its qualities.
So there you have it.
2022-11-15
I read a couple of graphic novels recently. I read Grand Abyss Hotel by Marcos Prior and David Rubin.
Essentially, no result is positive or productive. In the end–and “Grand Abyss Hotel” ends a bit too suddenly–the book seems to be about a lot of competing ideals, but it is most certainly a treatise on violence as an agent of change. It’s about physical and emotional violence. It’s about how acts of violence can easily become the only recourse for feelings of frustration and powerlessness. As readers turn to the narrative’s final page (perhaps surprised to find the remainder of the beautifully produced book’s pages are sketchbook and other process-related back matter) they might be hard-pressed to define the somewhat slight albeit conceptually-packed story being told here as much as a presentation of a moment in time, an inflection point that hinges on a historic moment, a resignation announcement from the highest office in the land, a promise of hope. Unfortunately, one suspects that the cycle will repeat itself again and this moment in history will flip back to page one before long.
And I read Cruel Summer by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
Cruel Summer is full of people on the run. Dan Farraday is a private investigator who specializes in ‘hunting’ people. The woman he’s chasing, Jane, herself “spent most of her life running” from a sense of inevitable doom, “trying to feel alive, like it’s an act of defiance”. And Teeg Lawless (Jane’s lover and Ricky’s dad) also lives by the edge of his teeth, finding a precarious happiness in Jane he relentlessly pursues, the book commenting “Teeg Lawless was in love, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him”. Criminal’s characters are crooks, obviously – even Farraday has demons of his own – but the series is so compelling by placing you inside their mindset, able to detect their impending destruction but unable to stop themselves running towards it.
I thought it was pretty good.
2022-11-19
I finished Andrew S. Curran's Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely a few days ago.
Reading Clauswitz made me want to read about Frederick the Great and reading about Freddy made me want to read more about the philosophes. Here's some stuff from the review:
With confidence and care, Curran traces Diderot’s breathtaking intellectual itinerary. He does a fine job in explaining why the Encyclopédie was so revolutionary — think of it as the 18th-century’s internet — and why, without Diderot’s unflagging commitment (he wrote some 5,000 of the entries), courage (he refused to move the operation to more clement climes, even though he lived under the threat of imprisonment), and cleverness (including the ploys used to undermine the orthodox entries he was forced to publish in its pages), the 28-volume work would never have seen the light of day. He also provides cogent and insightful accounts of some of Diderot’s own books, both those that were his and his alone, like D’Alembert’s Dream and The Nun, and those he wrote in collaboration with others, most notably the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies.
Importantly, Curran also portrays both Diderot’s most attractive and most annoying qualities. He was a loyal friend, though in certain cases — most notoriously, with Rousseau — loyalty curdled into animosity. He was a loving father, though he did need a few years to warm up to his one and only surviving child, Angélique. He was rightly hailed as the Age of Conversation’s greatest talker, which prevented him from being any age’s greatest listener. He was light-years ahead of his peers in grasping the countless obstacles and miserable inequities facing women, but he also was a serial cheater on his wife. Yet these inconsistencies and contradictions, especially in his writings, also make for Diderot’s greatness. His chief legacy, as Curran concludes, is “this cacophony of individual voices and ideas […] and his willingness to give a platform to the unthinkable and the uncomfortable, and to question all received authorities — be they religious, political, or societal.”
I've read almost three-quarters of David Suzuki and journalist David Robert Taylor's 2009 book The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity and a Quickly Changing Planet.
From the review it appears it is a collection of essays done for a website. Which explains some of the repetition. I agree with the reviewer that the writing style is highly colloquial. But the real reason I don't think that I can finish it is that it is too depressing that Suzuki is describing crises in 2009 and we have done essentially nothing about them by 2022. Things continue to deteriorate. And, furthermore, when I was doing one of my rare looks at mainstream news, I looked at the BC NDP's termination of the campaign for party leader of Anjali Appadurai, like a moth to the flames, I looked at the comments under the CBC story. Whatever one thinks of the BC NDP's disqualification of Appadurai, what sickened and infuriated me was the stupid assholes talking about how Appadurai's desire to respond seriously to global heating was going to be ruinously expensive and crippling to the economy.
Civilization is in grave danger and these arrogant assholes are still yammering ignorantly about their economic delusions! I just can't take it anymore.
2022-11-26
I just finished Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders. A group will be discussing it at my local library and I figure I should get involved in such things.
Apreternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon
FWIW I thought her boyfriend did it. (Maybe he did!)
2022:12-09
Yesterday I finished Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, a biography by Robert K. Massie. According to that review, Massie, a journalist, was in his eighties when he wrote this biography. He'd first found acclaim in the late-sixties with a biography of the last Romanovs.
Anyhow, I thought this was a very entertaining read. I'd recently finished a biography of Diderot and read about his visit with Catherine the Great, of whom I knew very little. My only complaint was that while Massie deals with the sprawling subject matter in various themes he doesn't delineate them precisely enough. When he goes over the same ground (for instance, in the chapter on Catherine's various "favourites") sometimes I thought: "Wait, haven't I read about this war three chapters ago?" It's a minor quibble. I want to buy a copy of this book for a friend.
2022-12-10
I finished Moomin: The Complete Lars Jansson Comic Strip [Book 6].
I printed some papers at the library and I realized that I needed something to keep them flat so a big, thin hardcover was the perfect solution. A smart friend of mine liked the "Moomin" books so I decided to read it. It was funnier than I'd expected.
Couldn't copy and paste anything from the review. I guess you'll have to go there yourself.
December is the last month for this round-up of my reading. Stay tuned folks. I'm sure more books will be read before New Year's Eve 2022!!!!!!
2022-12-18
A lot of people I admire are fans of Kurt Vonnegut. So I decided to start reading him. I recently finished Cat's Cradle.
It's a quick read. Fun. Horrible. The way the main disaster happened was very well-written.
I also finished two comical funny books.
Peter Bagge's Reset.
I always thought there was something more sinister the government was up to then turned out to be the case.
One of Bagge’s gifts is giving narrative cliches a hard slapdown, and the “Groundhog Day” premise laid out by the opening scenes quickly mutates into something weirder and funnier. Every one of these characters is keeping secrets from everyone else, and each successive revelation raises the stakes and changes the rules.
Finally, without my glasses on at the library, I picked out what turned out to be issue five of Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky.
I saw the title and remembered hearing about this amongst my cartoonist friends. The artist's name "Chip Zdarsky" made it easier to remember. So I dropped myself in the middle (or near the end?) of some ongoing series. But it's well written. Drawn well. Worthwhile.
2022-12-24
I think I'll make these two books my last entries for this Giant Book Depository post for 2022.
First up: Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion & the Appetite for Wonder.
Dawkins takes to heart his title of Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford in this thoughtful exegesis on the nature of science and why its detractors are all wrong. More with pity than anger, he takes Keats to task for faulting “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow in the long poem “Lamia.” On the contrary, Dawkins observes, Newton’s use of a prism to split white light into the spectrum not only led to our understanding of how rainbows form in raindrops, but enabled astronomers to read the make-up of stars. Dawkins devotes a few chapters to debunking astrology, magic, and clairvoyance, arguing that, as rational adults, we need to be critical about ideas.
The universe as described by science (of a mysterious "Big Bang" creating infinitesimally small sub-atomic thingamabobbies like "quarks" and "gluons" that transmorgrifry into protons and neutrons that eventually form hydrogen atoms that collect together into stars that have enough pressure at their cores to fuse those hydrogen atoms into helium atoms thus creating "LIGHT" (which includes electromagnetism somehow) ... much more wonderful than the weird creation stories our pre-scientific ancestors came up with.
The other book was Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty's excellent The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy.
This book starts with a macroscopic analysis of where the existing corporate capitalist economy goes wrong — the pathological effects of debt-based currency, a GDP that counts waste as “growth,” etc. — and proceeds to outline a detailed blueprint for a resilient alternative. This latter blueprint, in a series of detailed chapters, examines the authors’ proposals for a sustainable successor society.
Most of the proposals are things readers in the green, decentralist and alternative economics communities are probably familiar with: basic guaranteed incomes, barter currencies, taxation of land value and extraction, community land trusts, employee ownership and self-management as the standard business model, etc. Each of them, by itself, involves the kind of fundamental structural change you could spend days imagining the effects of.
My two cents: The authors provide several important, real-world examples of alternative economic projects with a systematic comparison with capitalist/corporatist standards. My only quibble is the authors' lack of discussion of the political will necessary to make these practices the hegemonic model over and above the ones mandated by the oligarchs.
Some comment from Jiff Bizzo's website:
The Resilience Imperative is a must read for both leaders and followers seeking survival of society. The book identifies the need to overcome what the authors state as the: "most dangerous idea in the world is that humans are separate from the rest of nature".
The subtitle of the book says it all: "Cooperative transitions to a steady-state economy". The book is full of practical self-help bottom up techniques for building a sustainable society.
Compelling evidence for action is presented. These arise from excessive exploitation of the environment, global warming and a financial system that has proved to be neither self-regulating nor capable of reliable regulation.
"Five exit ramps" are identified for transitioning to a sustainable society. 1. Resiliency: Strengthening our capacity to adapt, 2. Reclaiming the commons, 3. Reinventing democracy, 4. Constructing a social solidarity economy, and 5. Pricing as if people and the planet mattered.
Although not stated, the book may prove to be even more valuable as an intellectual guide on how to rebuild society after an almighty financial crash. A crash far greater than the Great Depression 85 years ago is now appearing inevitable. It will be far greater because the Great Depression was not created by excessive private and/or Sovereign debt as exists today. A crash is inevitable, because Sovereign debt has become unsustainable. It has created a fiscal cliff in the US and in Europe it denies Sovereign bailouts of over leveraged banks.
Few have noticed that going in to debt financed the golden age of economic growth over the last half century in leading industrialised nations. This source of economic growth is longer available. In addition, economic growth is inhibited in over 20 of the advanced industrialised economies whose populations are now decreasing.
Without immigration, ghost suburbs will spread from Japan to Europe. It is not just a double whammy of: No more growth financed by debt, and Decreasing populations. But a triple whammy with people living longer and becoming more dependent upon welfare as the number of taxpayers to support them shrinks. Resilience will become the imperative!
This triple whammy may in the longer run sustain humanity by forcing de-growth on society. It could force the highway to the future to terminate in the five exit ramps described in the book. Instead of being exit ramps the examples and ideas presented in the book could become entry ramps to a more equitable, efficient, democratic, convivial and ecologically sustainable society.
Both Mike Lewis and Pat Conaty have extensive experience as community activists, leaders and change agents. Mike is Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal and Pat Conaty is Fellow of the leading UK think and do tank, The New Economics Foundation. Together they have unmatched practical experience and authority in initiating and leading social transitioning processes in the industrialized world.
Drawing on their working experience, contacts and research the authors provide a rich compilation of case studies on how local communities can begin the transition process to a steady state economy. These are used to illustrate their seven guiding principles for leaders and followers to transform society.
The authors first outline how corporations and banks evolved to become too: big, powerful, unaccountable, perverted, and unsustainable. Working alternatives are described based on human scale cooperative and mutual arrangements. These create exit/entry ramps to allow both common wealth and power to be more equitably shared to enrich democracy and build sustainable communities. Prosperity without growth becomes more practical.
The rich variety of working examples illustrates transitions in values, social structures and operations of social institutions. The transitions are an outcome of the seven principles of reliance: Diversity, Modularity, Social capital, Innovation, Overlap, Tight feedback loops, and Ecosystem services. Using somewhat different words, biologist would recognize that these principles described the architecture of life. In this way evolutionary processes provide a compelling endorsement for the book.
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Here's to more reading in 2023!
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